If subsidies for solar-panel manufactures is good policy, that’s because it forestalls future costs to the economy and the environment by hastening the day alternative-energy sources become cheaper than coal and oil. But these supports make sense neither as a way of creating jobs nor as a way of reducing income inequality. Indeed, because state subsidies to industry so rarely produce a stable source of jobs or growth, in the end they tend to amount to little more than transfers of taxpayer money to rich people.